With Me When I Die
by KittiKat626
Summary: [IchiRuki] Promise me one thing. Just one thing. Promise me... promise me that you'll be with me when I die. Please, just do that... for me.


**Disclaimer:** I do not own Bleach or the characters! Thanks to **CrystalRaindrop007 **for Beta'ing!

**

* * *

**

With Me When I Die

She had once promised she would be with me when I died. She told me she would be by my side, but she's not here. I always thought I would live to be an old man. Have a wife and kids, have a life. But here I am, not even eighteen, and I'm dying. And from something stupid. Something I could have prevented, or stopped, or fought. But I tried that. I tried to fight, and no I'm tired and I can't fight anymore.

I just want to give up.

But every time I see the sad face of my father, and the tears rolling down the face of my little sisters, it makes me fight that much more.

But there is nothing I can do now. I'm dying, and I cannot stop it. I'm really, _truly_, dying.

I guess I thought about it a lot. Before, when she was with me. When we would fight Hollows, and we would put our lives on the line every single day, I thought about death a lot.

I was a Shinigami. I _am_ a Shinigami. But now I can barely move, and every time I feel that someone is in danger or getting hurt by a Hollow, there isn't a damn thing I can do about it.

It all happened a few months ago, I guess. I passed out in class, and when I woke up in the hospital, she was by my side, sitting on a plastic chair with her small form curled into it. She had her head in her hands and she was crying. Her sobs wracked her small body, and when she looked up into my tired eyes, her bright violet orbs betrayed everything she was trying to hide inside.

_"What's wrong?"_

_She didn't speak. She could only cry. I wanted to reach out to her and wipe her tears away, but there were too many tubes in my arm to count. I couldn't move much, and as more and more awareness returned, I realized that I was in pain. It wasn't a deep pain, just a slight throb. _

_"Rukia?"_

_She looked up into my eyes again and spoke three words, having to force each out through a sob._

_"I-I'm sorry, I-Ichigo . . ."_

_The pain in her eyes was terrible. The happy shine of her bright violet eyes every time she saw a new contraption, such as a juice pack or a gum-ball machine, was gone and it was replaced by a deep, jarring pain that seemed to fill her whole soul and overflow from her eyes, clinging to her tears like raindrops._

_"Rukia? What's wrong?" I asked again._

_I was worried. She scared me. The way she looked at me scared me. And the way she was crying, for me, was scaring me._

_"They said . . . they said . . . that y-your dying."_

_And then my whole world crashed down around me. _

It was a brain tumor. A stupid brain tumor. They kept telling me I couldn't have done anything to stop it. That I couldn't have done _anything_, but I keep feeling as though I could have, even though I know I couldn't.

I tried to live normally after that. After they tried to remove the tumor, and it didn't work, they said I only had a short time to live. They said that I should tie up any loose ends in my life and do what I wanted to. I only had a few months.

Rukia helped me when trouble first started showing. My brain was the part of my body that sent commands to the rest of my body, so when the tumor began to grow, sometimes I couldn't move my arms right or walk straight. And she would be there to help me around or to help me eat when my arms shook so badly that I couldn't hold a spoon. She would help me with what she could, and she did it with a smile.

But beneath that smile, I saw pain. Raw, deep pain that I knew I had caused.

Then, she had to leave. There was problems arising in Soul Society, and her brother came to take her back. No one in the Soul Society had known about me dying up until then, but when he came I was puking up blood from the medicine the doctors were giving me. It was hurting me more than helping me, and sometimes it would cause me to cough blood or go into convulsions. The doctors didn't know why.

He saw me, and he saw my pain. He saw Rukia's pain, too. She had been there with me, and she had helped me through it. And we told him what was going on, and he said he was sorry that it was happening to me.

I had never heard him say those words. Ever. But I knew he meant it. I could see it in his eyes. But he still took her back. He took her away from _me._

_"Rukia?" I asked quietly, breathing heavily as I tried to continue standing. She looked back at me, and as the tears began to flow from her eyes, she ran back and wrapped her arms around me, whispering 'I'm sorry' again and again. I wrapped my arms around her as best as I could, but my whole body was weak and I was tired. I slept most of the time now, and I had been awake for over seven hours now._

_"I'm sorry, Ichigo," she said. "I'm sorry I can't be with you."_

_"It's OK, Rukia. It really is. But will you . . . will you promise me one thing?" I asked, breaking off and coughing. She nodded as I wiped away her tears. I said, "Promise that you'll be with me when I die."_

_"Ichigo . . . "_

_She was crying again, and in her eyes I could tell that she didn't want to believe that I was going to die. But I was. I was going to; I could feel it. And there was no more fighting. My body was dying, and I would die with it._

_"Please, Rukia. _Please_ promise me at least that."_

_She nodded slowly._

_"I promise, Ichigo."_

_And then she left. She had no choice, really. She had to go with her brother back to the Soul Society._

And she wasn't here. I would die tonight. Death was close. I could feel it. It was like a weight on my chest. And I didn't struggle as I felt death come upon me; I just closed my eyes and listened to the music flowing through my headphones. It was soft; it calmed me and made me feel at peace.

But then, I felt something else. I felt a small, soft hand encase my own frail, thin one. I forced my eyes open and smiled.

"I promised," she said, biting back a sob as tears brimmed on the edge of her eyes.

And I closed my own eyes again, after looking deeply in hers for the last time, and hoped that, sometime, someway, I could wipe that pain away and hold her in my arms just once more.

"Thanks . . . Rukia."

* * *

**Attention**: Most people believe that, when Ichigo dies, he'll go to Soul Society. As for me, _I do not_, and that was part of what this story was centered around. My reasons to believe as I do are this: Ichigo's soul is a Shinigami. His body is simply a vessel, like a gigai. When someone dies, their body stays where it is at. Their soul is the part of them that goes to Soul Society. And, as such, I think that when Ichigo dies, he will not go to soul society, as he is already a Shinigami. The emotion in this story was supposed to be Rukia's grief over losing Ichigo** forever**.

**Please Review!**


End file.
